Outdoor PoE Cable, Built for the Whole Run

Power over Ethernet moved the hard part of the network outdoors. A single cable now carries both the data and the power for an access point on a car-park pole, a camera on a gatehouse, or a reader on an exterior door. That convenience has a cost: one cable failure takes out both services at once, and it takes them out in the least accessible place on the site.

Wider Cable has manufactured Ethernet cable since 2005, from bare copper through to the finished, tested reel, across two facilities — our Dongguan headquarters in Guangdong, China, and a second plant in Hưng Yên, Vietnam. Outdoor PoE is built on that same raw-material-to-finished control.

What makes outdoor PoE its own problem

PoE puts current on the same pairs that carry the data. IEEE 802.3af (Type 1) delivers 15.4 W at the port; 802.3at — PoE+, Type 2 — raises that to 30 W. Every watt that does not reach the device becomes heat in the conductor, and heat inside a bundle raises insertion loss for every cable around it. Outdoors you add ultraviolet exposure, thermal cycling between night and afternoon, standing water in ducts, and mechanical load from wind and ice.

Three things follow, and they drive every specification decision:

• Conductor gauge does more work than category. Two cables can both be Cat6A and behave completely differently on a long powered run, because DC resistance — not bandwidth — sets the voltage drop and the heat rise. Heavier solid copper is specified for long PoE runs; the thin stranded conductors that are fine inside a rack are not.
• Shielding is not only about crosstalk. An F/UTP or S/FTP construction gives the run a continuous metallic path to bond and earth, which matters as soon as a cable leaves the building envelope and enters a different electrical environment.
• The jacket is the part that fails first. Everything else is protected by it. Outdoor jackets are formulated for sunlight and cold, and rated for the installation method — direct exposure, conduit, or aerial.

Where buyers deploy it

• Campus and car-park wireless — access points on poles, façades and light columns, powered from a switch inside the building.
• Perimeter and site CCTV — fixed and PTZ cameras in positions where running a separate mains feed would double the civils cost.
• Gates, barriers and access control — readers and controllers sitting at the boundary of a site.
• Building-to-building links across a yard, car park or compound, where fibre is over-specified for the distance involved.
• Outdoor signage, kiosks and charging-point telemetry, which increasingly draw their power over the data run.

How we build it

Our outdoor Ethernet construction uses a c(UL)-listed CMX Outdoor / CMR-rated jacket with F/UTP shielding, formulated to resist ultraviolet exposure and cold. Everything else is specified per order:

PoE and PoE+ are supported across the range. If you are deploying at a higher power budget, send us the run length, bundle size and ambient conditions and we will confirm the construction rather than guess at it.

Certification and testing

Finished cable is Fluke-tested before it ships — the test result, not a datasheet, is the evidence a buyer can hold us to. Across the range we hold UL, c(UL), ETL, CPR, RoHS, REACH, CE, SGS, ISO and TÜV, attached to the constructions that genuinely carry them. For EU projects, tell us the reaction-to-fire class your specification calls for and we will confirm what we can supply against it.

Ordering and customisation

We are an OEM/ODM manufacturer, so the usual route is not "pick a part number". Send the specification — category, shielding, gauge, jacket rating, length, colour, packaging and any private-label requirement — and we quote against it. Where the requirement sits outside a standard construction, our custom cable service covers development from drawing to first article.

Related: Outdoor Ethernet cables · Custom PoE cables · UV resistant cables

Common questions

Does this cable support PoE and PoE+?

Yes — Power over Ethernet and PoE+ are supported across our Ethernet range. For higher-power deployments, confirm the run length and bundle size with us so the conductor gauge is specified correctly rather than assumed.

Can it be buried or run aerially?

Tell us the installation method with the enquiry. Direct burial, duct and aerial runs each call for a different jacket and, in some cases, additional protection. We specify the construction to the method rather than supplying one cable and hoping it covers all three.

Do you supply bulk reels as well as assembled cords?

Both. Assembled patch cords run from 0.2 m to 25 m; bulk cable is supplied to your reel length.

What documentation comes with the order?

Fluke test results, plus the certification documents relevant to the construction supplied. Ask for the specific certificate your project needs at quotation stage so it is prepared with the shipment.